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Cell paper, once plagiarized, pulled for dodgy figures

A while back (last June, to be precise), we wrote about a group of Japanese endocrinologists who found a creative way to up their citation counts using duplicate publication. At the time, the researchers were docked a 2004 paper in the Journal of Steroid Biochemistry & Molecular Biology that had self-plagiarized extensively from a 2003 article in Cell.

Well, skeptics of this new math take heart: The group’s publication total has fallen yet again. Turns out that 2003 paper — which has been cited 160 times, up from 144 when we checked last year, according to Thomson Scientific’s Web of Knowledge — wasn’t quite up to snuff, either.

Our paper reported that a chromatin-remodeling complex, WINAC, recruited the unliganded vitamin D receptor to promoters in cooperation with the transcription factor implicated in Williams syndrome, WSTF. The findings provided insights into the coordination between chromatin remodelers and sequence-specific transcription factors and pointed to a role of chromatin remodeling defects in Williams syndrome. We recently identified errors affecting several figure panels where original data were processed inappropriately such that the figure panels do not accurately report the original data. We believe that the most responsible course of action is to retract the paper. We sincerely apologize to the scientific community for any inconvenience that this might cause. The first author, H.K., declined to sign the retraction notice.

H.K. is Hirochika Kitagawa, who is listed as being with the University of Tokyo and the University of Tokushima School of Medicine.

Now, we’re not sure we know what kind of “inappropriate processing” went on here, but we have a guess, and let’s just say it sounds like the the kind of “processing” fast food chains do with their “meat.”

Photoshop strikes again, heh… What I don’t get is the following – if the figures in the Cell paper were made up in the first place, why plagiarize it? Why not make up a whole bunch of shiny new data? How lazy one must really be to plagiarize one’s own fraudulent work?…

“Now, we’re not sure we know what kind of “inappropriate processing” went on here, but we have a guess, and let’s just say it sounds like the the kind of “processing” fast food chains do with their “meat.”” Pink slime, you’re saying?

Others (from different university/country/science) are more creative in their self-plagiarism:

When re-using the original colour figures as identical, they show these in the “new paper” as black-and-white figures and, as university professors being aware of software for detecting plagiarism, they reshuffle the words in the titles.

Shigeaki Kato resigned from his professor position at the University of Tokyo as of the end of March, 2012, taking responsibility of the misconduct. But the first author, Hirochika Kitagawa did not agree with the retraction of the Cell article. (Asahi newspaper, April 5, 2012)